Upton-on-line : Hot Nation on the Ice

This week,
upton-on-line examines the heart of the nation – a cultural
strategy for aotearoa new zealand (sic – lower case
fashionably intended as in upton-on-line).

The report was
commissioned by Helen Clark and her general factotum, Judith
Tizard. It was supposed to provide a strategic blueprint
for the cultural sector as part of the Government’s plan to
take the high ground in shaping a cool/hot new identity to
underpin a new sort of economy and society.

Being a
complex and mercurial sort of subject, it required a
talented and eclectic team – to wit, Hamish Keith, Paddy
Austin, Rob Garrett, David Gascoigne, Miranda Harcourt, Tim
Hazeldine, Witi Ihimaera, Gordon McLauchlan, Hirini Moko
Mead and Susan Paterson. How close to the pen these good
folk ever got is not known but the number of graphics
protecting the copyright of McDermott Miller Ltd, suggests
Richard Miller (of the same firm) had a large hand in it as
did the perennial Michael Volkerling from Victoria
University.

The report has been shrouded in controversy on
account of the Associate Minister’s handling of it.
Delivered to the Minister in early June, there was a
silence. Then a statement that the report hadn’t measured
up to expectations. It wasn’t going to be released – it was
the Government’s property. The Minister was going to get a
reference group together to review it and come up with what
she wanted. The Minister claimed Keith’s team hadn’t
strayed from their terms of reference. The ensuing fuss led
to a back down – the report was released, but still disowned
as failing to fulfil the government’s
mandate.

Upton-on-line has some ideas on what has gone
wrong. But first: what does the report say and is it such
a disaster that it should have occasioned full-blown
ministerial embarrassment?

The short answer is no. Given
only eight weeks to sketch the cultural sector’s Next
Supper, the team have produced a remarkably comprehensive
document. There’s plenty to debate in it (but who’s scared
of that?) and a large amount of useful information. People
should read this report. So should the Minister who has
tried to distance herself from it. It’s worth careful
consideration – and a proper national debate. We don’t need
another review group to interpret it for us.

Rather than
attempt a blow by blow account, upton-on-line provides a
flavour of the report under several headings: the
jargonistic, the pretentious, the useful, the contentious
and the brave. [Readers not wildly interested in the detail
should flick straight to the bit about the brave,
below.]

The Jargonistic

Somewhere or other consultants
and/or Treasury officials got their hands on the terms of
reference. The Minister can’t seriously claim that the team
went beyond their brief – it was almost indigestibly riddled
with the usual hierarchy of visions, goals, objectives, and
actions which provide a justification for just about
anything. It would have been difficult not to have stayed
within the terms of reference.

Unfortunately, much of
this verbal and conceptual baggage survived into the final
report. Try this for a 'vision': “To give form and
substance to the creative community as a national ideal.” A
national ideal? What do they mean? Or try this for a word
jam masquerading as an 'objective': “To maximise creative
potential through education training and strategic creative
individual development customised to the needs of cultural
enterprises”. Strategic creative individual development?
Whatever is that?

The good thing is that a lot of this
consultancy-speak can be deleted leaving the substance of
the report completely untouched.

The Pretentious

The
review team’s undoubted erudition is worn on both sleeves
rolled down. Upton-on-line does not scoff at the extensive
reconnaissance that has obviously been conducted in the
rarefied atmosphere of the artistic Hindu Kush. He just
questions whether the report needed to record so many arcane
map references. For example:

“…we are always multiple and
contradictory subjects, inhabitants of a diversity of
communities (as many really as the social relations in which
we participate and the subject positions they define)…”
(Mouffe, 1988:44)

Or how about this:

“…the globalisation
of politics, economics and daily consumption have weakened
traditional systems of identity-manifestation: customs and
legends, royal rituals and local saints no longer have the
persuasive force they once had to transmit identity. It
appears that cultural policies have been given the task … to
fill the void thus created.” (Eduard Delgado, Council of
Europe)

It is good to know that we have read Mouffe and
Delgado – and Bhaba and Blum and Gulbenkian and
Csikszentmihalyi. They’re household names (on Kelburn
Parade at least). But however fruitful the 'asynchronies'
of this intellectual ferment (p 91), upton-on-line felt
that ordinary readers like ministers and opposition
spokespersons (not to mention the consuming public) risked
being intimidated for no obvious gain. There were moments
(thankfully not too many) when the authors were
communicating with a remote priesthood.

The
Useful

Without a doubt, the report has pulled together a
large amount of valuable information about a large – but
radically under-described – segment of the economy and
society. This is the substance of the greater part of the
report – Part I: The Situation, pp 4-74.

There’s a wealth
of information about where the jobs in the sector are, the
contribution of the sector to GDP, its intersection with the
tourist and knowledge-based sectors, and the impact of
demographic change on likely consumer demand. The domestic
and international markets are described in some detail.
There are all sorts of morsels with which to shock and
entertain. Like the fact that there were 10 times as many
attendances at live pub music at a pub than the ballet in
the last year (I’m amazed ballet holds up so well); or that
surveyed levels of 'interest' in different activities put
classical music well ahead of vehicle maintenance and
gardening ahead of every leisure activity except reading and
rugby. (Rugby league is well behind on a par with home
decorating).

International tourists seem more cultivated
than we are. Visiting galleries, for them, is twice as
popular as jet boating and historic buildings are almost as
popular as casinos.

There is some particularly fascinating
material on segmentation within the leisure market. The
jealously copyright-conscious McDermott Miller boffins
present their four socio-economic quadrants – success,
aspiration, anxious security and constrained. Surprise,
surprise, the first two groups have either the money or the
leisure or both to indulge themselves with greater frequency
than the latter two.

Cultural sector growth prospects
look brightest with these tertiary educated, free-spending
folk who have either made it or are on the way there. The
report holds out strong hopes that these are the people who
will underwrite a vibrant, growing cultural sector.

It’s
all delightfully ironic that these are the very same people
the Government’s high tax policies are likely to drive to
Sydney and beyond. Perhaps our creative people will be
encouraged to follow them there… ?

The
Contentious

Just about every concrete recommendation will
be contentious. That’s because so much of what is
recommended is structural and involves upsetting apple
carts. That, despite the solemn declaration by the team
that “it is an essential principle of most strategic
planning that structure follows strategy”. The report then
proceeds to announce that “The first step in our strategy is
therefore concerned with structural change” (see p 110).
This disarmingly frank contradiction doesn’t evaporate on
further reading. It’s all a bit of a
mystery.

Upton-on-line identified at least six new
proposed entities not to mention a new cabinet committee and
all sorts of new partnerships, empowerments and strategic
overviews. There are complicated wire diagrams to prove
that it all works. At the heart of it all is a new quango
called the Creative Industries Development Agency. It would
be a talent recruiter, partnership broker, market developer
and sectoral portfolio manager. It has all the hallmarks of
Jim Anderton’s Industry New Zealand and is the sort of
plaything dirigiste political operatives on the Left just
love. It would be busily managing, developing and
co-ordinating the following segments of the
industry:

CIDA would sit above the Film Commission, the
Broadcasting Commission, the new Music Commission and a
proposed Heritage Commission.

Building from the Team’s
(accurate) analysis that after a decade of constructing
large edifices we need a decade focussed on creative people
being creative in them, they then propose a Creative
Resources Foundation. This truly wondrous entity would be a
honey pot for advice, career development, grants,
fellowships, tax advice for forgetfulCraftsmen who can’t
remember where the money all came from (the famous tenor
syndrome) and job creation schemes for artists (improbably
developed with WINZ).

To round things out there is a (very
sensible) proposal to fully digitise the documentary
heritage; and (inevitably from a task force stuffed with
academics and consultants) a proposal for something called a
Cultural Management and Research Centre where members of the
review team or even upton-on-line might one day be able to
retire!

There’s only one casualty - Creative New Zealand -
which just doesn’t fit the more proactive, industry
development model being espoused here

Now it would be
churlish to dismiss all of this. There are one or two
sensible proposals and even where the proposed solution is
questionable, there are real issues being highlighted (such
as training and career development) that should be
discussed.

For upton-on-line’s taste there is far too
much faith in government agencies and quangos as creators of
wealth and dynamism. His experience of quango-land is that
it is almost unavoidably self-perpetuating. This system
would spend far more money on middle men and administrators
than Creative New Zealand does. But there’s no reason to
believe the present system is perfect either.

The
Brave

Finally, there’s the genuinely brave element of the
report. I think everyone should read section 6.4 entitled
Our Neglected Identities. It will inevitably entail
controversy in its attempt to address the vexed issue of
national identity, bi-culturalism and multi-culturalism.
These debates are so often politically correct and
mealy-mouthed. This one, I think, is better. It admits
that beneath the slogans there is a good degree of
incoherence. More importantly, it questions whether we can
move forward if we are trapped by a notion of bi-culturalism
that thinks of cultures as hermetically sealed,
self-contained units. Here’s the key paragraph:

“However,
we also believe that a danger of current understandings of
both bicultural and multicultural policies is their
backward-looking focus on 'the reproductive processes of
culture' (Anthias, 1995:298). We believe there is equal
value in developing policy perspectives that are
forward-looking and are concerned with the 'removal of
barriers to the legitimacy of different ways of being';
embrace 'diversity, cultural penetration and hibridity'; and
focus on 'the transformative' (Anthias, 1995:298). There is
a need to find common meeting points and to work together
whenever possible. It should also be recognised for policy
purposes, that 'cultures can no longer be examined as if
they were islands in an archipelago'
(UNESCO,1998:16).”

There is something very sound here.
“Diversity, cultural penetration and hibridity” are the
reality of the communications saturated, global community of
which we’re part. Taking pleasure and pride in the unique
and distinct things about our heritages is important. But
so is an appreciation that visions of cultural identity that
demand a pure and undefiled separatism are ultimately
inward-looking, sterile and divisive.

I think the team has
said something really important here. There will be those
who question, then, their proposal for a separate Ministry
of Maori Arts, Culture & Heritage. It certainly needs
careful debate. But it is not necessarily contradictory of
their call for common meeting points. The fact is that we
do spend money for the purpose of maintaining elements of
our heritage from which we seek to draw future inspiration.
If it’s good enough to devolve health delivery directly to
iwi (as upton-on-line's health reforms did) it’s good enough
to let Maori direct the public funds allotted to Maori arts,
crafts, language and broadcasting. Since taxpayers provide
the funds, Maori have to be accountable for the expenditure
like anyone else. But the funds don’t have to be
administered by a monolithic central bureaucracy.

My hunch
is that the review team took the view that they could only
advance the argument for a converging and hybridising future
if they advocated a separation of the core, traditional
funding channels. Maori are rightly suspicious of
'assimilationist' policies. If a separation of purely Maori
cultural funding is the price we pay for a frank admission
that future has to be an open-ended, creative one rather
than a closed, culturally sealed one, then it may be worth
paying.

At the end of the day, both Maori and Europeans
suffer from peripherality. Maori are a tiny enclave in the
global commons. Europeans have fluency with a culture of
truly global reach. But they live in an isolated appendage
and draw on a tiny pool of skills. We haven’t been part of
a metropolitan economic and political culture for nearly
half a century. Battening down the hatches and treating our
cultural identities like our threatened wildlife will not
work. We have to be open to hybridisation and
transformation.

So Why the Panic?

Having now read the
report carefully, upton-on-line finds the reception given it
by ministers hard to fathom. All sorts of conspiracy
theories have been suggested to him, but long experience of
this sort of thing leads him to nominate truly incompetent
management as the prime culprit.

In the first place, the
Government should not have announced an $86 million arts
funding bonanza before it had even received the report –
especially when the terms of reference had cautioned against
mapping out a future that implied large increases in
expenditure.

The appropriate course would have been to
announce funding for those institutions that needed to be
baled out (like Te Papa, the NZSO and so on). Any other
money could have been parked as a fund that could be drawn
on once the strategic plan was finalised and the Government
was on board. (This is what was done with some of the
Closing the Gaps money). By doing what she did, the Prime
Minister left the clear impression that she knew what her
priorities were regardless of anything the review team might
recommend.

Secondly, ministers should have worked very
closely with Hamish Keith and his team to see that it didn’t
generate a report that, in the Government’s view, was wide
of the terms of reference. Upton-on-line has had quite a
bit of experience in commissioning reviews and rule number
one is that you keep in very close touch with your
reviewers. (You also give them terms of reference that
don’t look as though they’ve tripped off the State Services
Commission’s word processor). Upton-on-line wonders whether
Judith Tizard ever spent any real time with the team once it
had completed its consultations and started to form a
view.

Thirdly, ministers should have resolved to release
the report at the outset. They could have made it quite
clear that its conclusions would be without prejudice to any
decisions the Government might take. It should have
welcomed public comment on it – this is scarcely the sort of
stuff in which votes are at stake. For Judith Tizard to
think she could sit on it and invent another process to one
side is a reversion to the sort of politics that prevailed
before the Official Information Act was passed.

Finally,
ministers need to do some hard work sorting their own
thinking out. Throughout 1999 Labour in Opposition promised
reviews as a way of avoiding firm policy positions. It’s a
time-honoured formula. It’s time, now, for Helen Clark and
Judith Tizard to get beyond a 'feel good' identification
with one of its target audiences. It has to do some hard
thinking and take some decisions. Setting up another
reference group is a way of avoiding doing so – and a bit of
an insult to Hamish Keith and his team. If they’re so wide
of the mark (and I can’t see that they were) ask them to
re-cast some of the material.

Or is this all a bit of an
anti-climax? Was the Government really only interested in
the adulation of a spend up? Does the hard graft look
unattractive in comparison? After nine years in opposition,
I would have expected a much clearer sense of policy
direction from this government.

Helen Clark did an
inspired thing in taking the Arts Portfolio for herself.
It’s time that she briefed Tizard clearly about her
expectations or, better still, took control and spent some
time with the review team to get things back on the rails.
Otherwise, we risk $200,000 worth of analysis – some of it
very good – gathering dust.

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